Category: New

There is a very useful article about summer pruning for apples and pears on the RHS website – good advice about when and how to it.

Can you spend 15 minutes between 15 July and 7 August counting butterflies for a UK-wide survey? All the information is on their web site.

Here is an article by George Monbiot on soil, and how we might nurture it to keep producing food in years to come.

The Pesticide Action Network has produced a useful guide to gardening without pesticides. The link for the download is about 2/3 of the way down the page.

A researcher in America has found a highly effective, non-toxic and cheap slug bait. Is this what we have been looking for all these years? Why not try it and see? (But what is the best way of getting rid of the slugs once you catch them?)

Well, the first time I tried it the rats ate the bread dough before the slugs found it. I’ll try again with wire mesh to stop the rats.

Citizen science research in Brighton and Hove shows that allotments can be as productive as conventional farms. This is a separate project from Measure Your Harvest, which comes from the University of Sheffield, and has published similar findings.

What if the land owners decide to sell off your self-managed allotment site? One action your allotment association could take now would be to “nominate” the land to become an “Asset of Community Value”. This means that the sale of the land would be delayed by six months to give community groups time to enter a bid to buy the land. Nominating the land costs nothing, and the form is available from the Council’s web page. There is more helpful information about the process on that web page, too.

Sad loss of a Leeds Allotments Stalwart

Melvin Nowland, an allotment plot-holder and Trustee at Headingley Station West Allotments in Leeds, has sadly died following a long illness.

He was committed to the preservation of the allotment movement in Leeds and could be, quite rightly, outspoken to influences he thought detrimental to the allotment movement in Leeds. He was an active member of the Leeds Allotments Federation for more years than I can remember. Even when wheelchair bound, he attended meetings regularly, and events when he could, he showed a very commendable commitment and remained a stalwart to our allotment movement in Leeds.

His contribution to the preservation and running of allotments in Leeds will be sadly missed.

From Phil Gomersall

Here is an interesting article in The Guardian about coping with slugs and snails in our gardens. Can we ever win? Can we even just break even?